Dr. Norma A. Alcantar is Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the Dept. of Chemical, Biological, and Materials Engineering at the Univ. of South Florida. She is a global pioneer in developing innovative, natural technologies for environmental, medical, and industrial applications, including improving access to clean drinking water, oil spill cleanup, and cancer tumor cell treatments. She was inducted into the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame, and is a Fellow of AIChE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Inventors. She currently holds 23 patents. As an American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow, she chairs the Committee for Underrepresented Minorities and is a Biomedical Engineering Society (BME) Organizations Leading Diversity (BOLD) committee member. Alcantar received a Core Fulbright U.S. Scholar Fellowship and an Excellence in Innovation Award, and in 2017 she accepted a Jewish National Fund’s Faculty Fellowship to visit Israel as a U.S. academic representative. From 2005 to 2019, she was a departmental mentor and director for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Minority Scholars Program to advance the careers of students underrepresented in STEM fields. She earned her PhD in chemical engineering from the Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, and her BS from the National Autonomous Univ. of Mexico.